She confided in her former boyfriend about explicit videos she found on her boyfriend’s hard disk involving herself, his former girlfriend and other women.

But instead of complying with her request to pass the hard disk to the police, the man, 27, used it to blackmail the boyfriend.

In what a district judge called an elaborate ploy, the man, who works in a recruitment company, even made up three different personas for the ruse.

Yesterday, the man was jailed for 16 weeks and fined $10,000 for criminal intimidation, impersonating a Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) officer, and for an unrelated offence of publicising an illegal poker game on Facebook.

The man cannot be named to protect the identities of the victims – the boyfriend, 28, identified in court documents as V1, and his former girlfriend, 27, identified as V2. V1’s then girlfriend, 26, was identified as V3.

The court heard V3 had found the hard disk in V1’s home and discovered the videos in December 2017.

Worried V1 would use the videos as leverage against her if they quarrelled, the woman told the accused about it and asked him to help her hand the hard disk over to the police.

On Jan 9, 2018, he called V2’s office, identified himself as a CPIB officer and accused her of disclosing personal data of her company’s clients and other confidential information.